With the general advance of the expedition under Lord Wolseley to rescue Gordon, our story has only had a certain connection--a mission undertaken far too late, but during which the mind at home was kept at fever-heat by news from that burning seat of strife, recording the sufferings of our soldiers, and the bloody but victorious battles with the Mahdists, till the dark and terrible tidings came, that just as Wilson's column was ready to join Gordon, who had sent his steamers to Metemneh to meet him--Khartoum, after a defence perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of peril and glory, had fallen by storm and treachery, and the people of Britain were left to wonder, and in doubt, whether a stupendous blunder or an unpardonable crime had been perpetrated. CHAPTER LVIII. IN THE SHOUBRAH GARDENS. Roland lost no time in telegraphing home for news of the missing ones, but received none; Mr. M'Wadsett was absent from town, so he and Jack Elliot, who was far from recovery yet, had to take patience and wait, they scarcely knew for what. One fact was too patent, that both Hester and Maude had disappeared--one too probably in penury and the other in an agony of grief and shame. It was not even known, apparently, whether they were together. They had vanished, and, save a cheque or two cashed by Jack's bankers, left no trace of how or when; and a chilling fear crept over the hearts of both men as to what might have happened--illness, poverty, unthought-of snares, even death itself. Meanwhile, 'the shadow, cloaked from head to foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds,' was hovering perilously near Jack, for whom Roland procured quarters in a pleasant house in the beautiful Shoubrah Road, near Cairo--a broad but shady avenue formed of noble sycamores, the 'Rotten Row' of the city, and day followed day somewhat monotonously now, though a letter dated some weeks back from his legal friend of Thistle Court gave Roland some occasion for gratifying thought. 'If you can return,' it ran, 'must I remind you that now Earlshaugh is unoccupied; the land so far neglected, and the tenants well-nigh forgotten; the rents are accumulating at your bankers', but no good is done to anyone. Your proper place and position is your own again; justice has restored your birthright; so come home at once and act wisely--home, my dear friend, and you shall have such a welcome as Earlshaugh has not seen since your father came back after the Crimean War.' Pondering over this letter and on what the future might have in store, Roland was one afternoon idling over a cigarette in the gardens of the Shoubrah Palace, an edifice which rises from the bank of the Nile. On one side are pleasant glimpses of the latter, with its palm-clad banks and sparkling villages; on the other a tract of brilliantly tinted cultivation, and beyond it the golden sands of the desert, the shifting hillocks they form, and the gray peaks of several pyramids.